[sustran] Jane Jacobs and Land Use

[John Renne]

Dear Wendell and others,

In Jane Jacobs's 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' a powerful 
insight is provided about automobiles and cities (Chapter 18).

Jacobs states about horses and cars, "The power of mechanized vehicles, and 
their greater speed than horses, can make it easier to reconcile great 
concentrations of people with efficient movement of people and goods... [the 
problem is that]...We went awry by replacing, in effect, each horse on the 
crowded city streets with half a dozen or so mechanized vehicles, instead of 
using each mechanized vehicle to replace half a dozen or so horses. The 
mechanized vehicles, in their overabundance, work slothfully and idle much.  
As one consequence of such low efficiency, the powerful and speedy vehicles, 
choked by their own redundancy, don't move much faster than horses."  In her 
book she quoted the New York times stating, "The truth is that a horse and 
buggy could cross Los Angles almost as fast in 1900 as an automobile can 
make this trip at 5 p.m. today (1960)".

This problem has not gotten better in our cities today. I feel this is due 
to the fact that we have one main limited resource and that is land. We need 
to work to promote sustainable transportation which means that different 
solutions will work in different places. We need to reassess our land uses 
first and then discuss the specific technologies of movement second.

If you study the rest of her book and many other authors who have followed 
her, you can begin to understand the configurations of land uses that 
produce more sustainable outcomes for cities.

Best,

John Renne
Visiting Scholar
Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy
Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia

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